Fascinating food in New York and occasionally farther afield

Bakeries

A standard portion of Spindler's "heavy" crumb cake, the bake shop's only crumb cake as best as I could gather, is about half the size of the slab shown here. By heft alone, it suggests a building block — except that it's cake, and more crumb than not.

In the name of this new cafe, the apostrophe-t is a contraction of "at," the Filipino word for "and." So, then, "Kape't Torta" means something like "Coffee 'n' Cake." On this visit, my chosen cake was a particularly lush cheese ensaymada, the archipelago's answer to the sticky bun.

"Poppy seed strudel" was the label. For English speakers who would be flummoxed by "makowiec" (mah-Koh-vee-ets), as the counterwoman called it — literally "poppy seed cake" in Polish — it's a much easier name to manage. The bakery still has many Slovak customers, too, so asking for "koláč (Koh-lahtch), whether rolled with poppy seeds or with crushed walnuts, will work just as well.

At La Gran Via Bakery, in Jackson Heights, only the smile of co-owner Betsy Leites outshines the show-stopping display. When it's time for coffee, Betsy pulls a potent cortadito, too. Read more on Culinary Backstreets.

A busload of tourists had just left, Julia Molina told me, after eating a swath through the bakery display. Many of the more photogenic confections seemed to have vanished, but brown slabs of bread pudding, too moist to stand without support from their neighbors, caught my eye. This one sported walnuts, too.